One Favorite and One Dud in Mini-Reviews

I particularly wanted to review this book I read in December about a hospital in small town Ohio because it was one of my favorite reads last year for many reasons. First of all, it was pretty cool that it was in a town that’s only about an hour and a half from where I went to high school. Second, it was an incredible insider account of a how a small town, independent hospital works. I enjoyed learning about the challenges they face financially; the difficulty they have recruiting doctors; and the pressures they face from larger hospital systems that receive bulk discounts on medical supplies and insurers. It’s truly impressive how broken the system is. Last but not least, the author’s description of the town itself was a compassionate, but not uncritical look at the beliefs and lives of the people in this conservative Ohio town. So, in many ways this was a look at parts of the world I am close to, but knew nothing about. I really appreciated the use of interviews and personal stories to teach me something new.

Title: The Last Job: “The Bad Grandpas” and the Hatton Garden Heist
Author: Dan Bilefsky
Source: Library
Links: Bookshop (affiliate link) |Goodreads
Rating:

This book was not good enough that I would have been motivated to review it on its own. There are a lot of complaints about cliched writing in other goodreads reviews, but that didn’t bother me. There are a lot of cliched things to say about a bunch of older thieves pulling off one last job. We’ve all seen that movie! So I think some cliches were inevitable, but I didn’t think the writing was bad. I thought it was serviceable enough to make for a good book,had the story been more exciting and/or better organized. Parts were repetitive, to the point where entire sentences were repeated twice on multiple occasions. I had a review copy, so it’s possible the sentence level repetition was fixed in the final book. I think it’s unlikely that the higher level repetition – for example, two sections covering the same character’s background – were fixed. That would have required some extensive changes. This repetition may have been the author’s attempt to compensate for what was actually a pretty thin story. Although the concept was fascinating, the police quickly figured out who was responsible for the robbery and we spent much of the book on the minutiae of the police eavesdropping on the daily lives of several older men. There just wasn’t enough there to sustain a story.

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